Let's go to the Annie mansion!
Yes, the actual real-life Warbucks mansion from the 1982 movie
Raise your hand if you were obsessed with the 1982 movie Annie as a kid. I don’t know if you can see it over here, but I’m raising both hands and feet for good measure.
To say that Annie was my first pop culture obsession could possibly be an understatement. I love(d) that movie as deeply as I love(d) Hamilton many decades later, and had all the merch to back it up.
I used to walk around all day in the full Annie costume, including wig, acted out the soundtrack repeatedly, and played with a doll-size version of the mansion instead of a Barbie Dream House.
So when I met my now-husband, Dan, and he mentioned we could actually visit the Annie mansion, I was like, “let’s get married immediately. You understand me completely.”
Not really, but kind of.
The Annie mansion in real-life is The Great Hall at Shadow Lawn at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, NJ, and it’s open to the public as a school administration building.
Which means you really can just stroll in and start singing “I Think I’m Gonna Like it Here” if you’re bold enough to do it in front of a bunch of students and staff.
We hadn’t visited in 20-something years, so after rewatching the movie on Netflix recently, I decided I needed to see the mansion again. So I went, this time with my DSLR, to fully document the space and match it up with what we see in the film.
And I created a full blog post comparing movie screenshots to the building spaces as they are today. It’s incredibly well-preserved and restored, since the building is a National Historic Landmark (whew!).
My favorite discovery has to be the second-floor ladies’ bathroom, which is a pink marble confection and which happens to be the place where Drake gives Sandy a bubble bath in the movie. You can see the tub behind me in this shot:
Head over to caseybarber.com to see the whole thing.
Bonus: Annie Went Over My Head
Because I was 4 years old when Annie was released, there were a lot of references in the movie and songs I did not fully understand (along with the awful racist tropes of Punjab and the Asp). And yet I sang along happily — and learned some things too.
Here are just a few:
That Miss Hannigan was a raging alcoholic making bathtub gin, for one!
Mickey Finn (in “It’s the Hard Knock Life”)
The Bolsheviks
Don Budge (in “I Think I’m Gonna Like it Here”)
the whole “Camille” clip interlude at Radio City, which always seemed superfluous to me as a kid
pretty much every pop culture reference in “We Got Annie”: Mutt and Jeff, Benny Goodman, Bing (Crosby), etc.
Buenos Ay-rees and Argen-TINE / Argen-TEEN (in “Sign”)
Did/do you love Annie on this level too, and have you revisited it lately? I’d love to read about your memories, so leave a comment below.